Jesse held up his scotch. “To Martina.”
Penworth grabbed the beer and raised it. “To my best girl.” He took a long drink.
“I spoke with Captain Healy, the state investigator, a little while ago,” Jesse said. “He was down at Tufts today, interviewing your daughter’s roommates and friends. He tells me Martina had only just started dating Ben Salter. Did she mention him to you guys?”
“She did. She liked him a lot. Too much, according to my wife. Jan was afraid Martina might not let herself get the full college experience if she got hooked up with a guy too soon.”
“Makes sense, but what did she tell you and your wife about Ben?”
Penworth shrugged. “That she really liked him and that he was cute and gentle and rich.”
“In that order?” Jesse said.
“In that order. Do you think he murd— Do you think he did this?”
“I don’t know, Jim.”
“But what do you think?” Then, before Jesse could answer, Penworth said, “Remember, you promised not to lie to us.”
“Right now, he’s our only suspect, but I don’t think he did it, no.”
“Why not?”
“Just my sense of things, but I’ve been wrong before. Don’t worry. I don’t investigate things based solely on hunches. We’ll follow the evidence, no matter where it leads. Your daughter’s life is worth more than my pride. And Healy cares even less about my hunches. He’s been at this a long time. We’re going to try our best to find out what happened and why.”
“Jan wants me to stick around until you find the boy,” he said.
“Go home, Jim. Bury your girl. I’ll call and keep you posted. When we track the guy down, you and your wife can come back for the trial.”
Jim Penworth looked at his watch with a kind of dread. “I better get back to the hotel to be with Jan. I don’t want her waking up in an empty room.”
Jesse stood, reaching for his wallet. “Let me take care of this and I’ll give you a lift back.”
“No! Sorry, Jesse, but I want to walk. I need some space.”
“Sure. You know the way?”
“I do, but I wouldn’t mind getting lost.” He extended his right hand to Jesse. “Thank you for this. It helped a little bit.”
Jesse shook his hand and watched Jim Penworth leave. He sat back down and finished his drink.
24
Vic Prado walked into Mike Frazetta’s TV room the way he walked into every room, like he owned it. The Outlaw Josey Wales was playing on the huge screen and Mike, as always, was mouthing the words with Clint Eastwood’s Josey Wales: “To hell with them fellas. Buzzards gotta eat, same as worms.” Vic stood there, shaking his head at his childhood friend. Some men grow old, he thought, but never grow up. Still, Mike Frazetta had gotten pretty far in life for a poor Italian kid from Lowell with a jones for Clint Eastwood Westerns. One thing Mike had always had was a steely determination. He tended to get what he wanted regardless of how he got it. If Mike had to pay for it, that was fine. But if someone else had to pay the price, that was even better. Mike owned a lot of things. A big heart wasn’t among them. One of the things he did own was Vic Prado—lock, stock, and barrel.
Mike was still busy watching the screen, waiting for Clint’s next line, but Joe Breen had spotted Vic the moment he walked in. Joe had just sat there in the dark, staring at Prado. Eventually, Vic felt the chill of Joe’s icy stare and turned to see Breen’s familiar and unwelcome silhouette. Vic and Joe had known each other since Joe’s mother had sent her son away from Boston to live with her brother in Lowell. “Maybe your uncle Declan can knock some sense into that thick skull of yours, boy” were his mother’s parting words. Joe’s uncle Dec, a tough Irishman from the other side with a brogue as thick as road tar, lived two doors down from the Prados and around the corner from the Frazettas. The boys had become a trio from early on, but there had always been something cold and menacing about Joe. It bothered Vic. It still bothered Vic. It never bothered Mike.
When he was sure he had unnerved Vic, Joe said, “Look who’s graced us with his presence, Boss. It’s the utility infielder from the Kansas City Royals.”
Vic cringed. Mike Frazetta wasn’t the only man in the room who hadn’t grown up. Vic had played fourteen years in the majors, but should have played only eleven. Toward the end of his career, with his knees failing and his bat slowing down, he’d leapt at a free-agent offer from the then-lowly Royals. It hadn’t worked out for either party. Switching leagues and having to learn a whole new set of opposing pitchers was tough. And adjusting to the designated-hitter rule drove him mad. For the last two years of his time in the bigs, Vic had been relegated to occasional pinch-hitting duty and playing once every two weeks, usually out of position. He was once a borderline hall-of-famer, but his time in KC had driven a stake through the heart of his chances for Cooperstown. He barely hit his weight, and his range in the field was very limited.
“Yo, Vic,” Mike said, clicking off the TV. He jumped off the couch and turned up the room lights. He put his hands on Vic’s biceps. “You look like a million fucking bucks, like always.”
Mike may have owned Vic, but he still admired him. It was like a hardwired dynamic. He couldn’t help himself. Although he was a few months older than Prado, was vastly better off and more powerful, he would always feel like Vic’s little brother.
“Thanks, Mike. I’m okay.” He looked over and saw Joe Breen smirking at him.
“‘Okay’? I hear you had a good time in New York on my dime, Vic.”
“Yeah, thanks for that. That was good of you to let me have the reunion.”
“Nah, forget about it,” Mike said, not meaning a word. “Where are Geno and Carlo?”
“Parked on the street. About them, Mike . . .”
“What about them?”
Vic said, “Can’t take them with me in Paradise. No way. They’ll stick out there and call attention to our business. A man like Harlan Salter will run in the other direction if he sees your boys with me.”
Mike turned red. “Harlan fucking Salter will do whatever the fuck I want as long as I got his son.”
“I admit you have leverage, Mike, but it’s limited. You kill the son and Salter will run to the cops and he’ll blow up the whole network. We got a scheme here that Madoff would be proud of. As long as we keep adding new firms to our group and use some of their assets to pay off the investors from the other groups, we got it made.”
“He’ll blow you up, Vic,” Breen said. “Salter doesn’t know Mike. He doesn’t know me. He knows you. See, that’s what a front is all about. And you aren’t likely to speak if you should be arrested, are you now?”
“Fuck you, Joe. I don’t need your implied threats. If you hadn’t killed that girl, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“Not for nothing, Vic,” Mike Frazetta said, “but if you had chosen more wisely in terms of asset-management firms, the girl would still be breathing. It was your mistake that killed the girl as much as Joe. So don’t be pushing back so hard.”
Vic knew Mike was right, but it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Vic picked Coastline Consultants Group precisely because he knew Harlan Salter IV would resist his overtures and because the Salter family was based in Paradise. He had timed everything just right. Had got Mike to let him have the reunion and got Jesse Stone to come. Maybe the girl’s murder would help him when it was all said and done, but it ate at him.
“Okay, Mike, I’m sorry, but I can’t have your guys around me. And I could tell Jesse Stone was already suspicious of them in New York. If I show up in some bullshit little town with bodyguards, he’s going to—”
Frazetta held up his palms. “You made your point.”
“Good.” Vic smiled with relief, but his win was short-lived.
“Geno and Carlo are out, but Joe will go instead. Before you say
anything, listen. He’ll just hang around at the fringes. He won’t be with you. He’ll just be keeping an eye on things, watching my back and yours at the same time.”
Vic knew better than to argue. This was as much of a concession as he was likely to get from Frazetta. “Whatever you say, Mike.”
“That’s better.” He went over to a desk, pulled out a file, and handed it over to Vic. “These are the new contract terms. Salter agrees and signs, he gets the kid back the following day. He don’t sign . . . well, he better sign.”
Meanwhile, Joe Breen slumped back in his chair. He had planned on spending the next few days at home in bed with Moira. He’d done all sorts of shopping to please the lass, bought a few bottles of expensive champagne. Now he’d have to babysit Vic Prado. One day, Joe promised himself, he would have that pebble out of his shoe once and for all.
25
He kept his cars like his appearance, innocuous and unthreatening. It was always best for them not to see you coming. This way you were on them before they could react. And it made the pain that much sweeter when they realized who it was killing them by the inch. Today his car was a white Nissan Sentra. Plain even by his standards, nearly invisible. Just the same, he hung back, keeping several cars between the Nissan and the limo. It never did well to be overconfident. Experience had schooled him that even the terminally oblivious sometimes checked their blind spots. That’s where he lived, where he made his living, in people’s blind spots.
It had been an uneventful trip, the limo driver finding a comfortable slot in the middle lane and doing a steady sixty from Boston up to Paradise. Paradise! How ridiculous, he thought. He wondered what got into people sometimes. Talk about tempting fate. Why not just name the place Heaven or Nirvana or Valhalla or Eden? It so cut against his instinct for invisibility that he couldn’t wait to poke his finger in the eyes of the town fathers. Everything about this job—the intense beauty of the victim; the client’s desire for a slow, painful revenge; an audience; even the name of the town—made him pray for the green light. He hated it when clients got weak-kneed and backed off. Sure, he got half his fee that way, without having to do the deed and risking capture, but he didn’t do what he did for the money, not exclusively. He did it for the rush, for the surprise in the victims’ eyes, for the joy of the pain.
The limo turned off the highway and onto the two-lane state road. He knew he could have easily kept going to the next exit and come into Paradise from the opposite end of town, but he got the sense that he should follow his first impulse and continue to trail the limo. Fortunately, enough cars exited the highway so that his white Sentra didn’t emerge from the scenery. Still, he slowed down and followed from even farther back than he had during the trip up from Boston. That, too, proved to be a wise decision as the cars between himself and the limo peeled away one by one until only the Sentra and the limo were left heading directly into town.
The town seemed like many other New England towns, places caught between their pasts and their futures, their myths and their mysteries. He shook his head at the quaint shops with harpoons above their doors and other whaling paraphernalia in their windows or used as signage. What was the deal with this whaling fixation? It seemed to him that every coastal town from Long Island to Maine wanted to lay claim to a whaling tradition. How odd, he thought. Did the towns in the Plains States want to brag about nearly killing off the bison? He wondered if the women in the limo were taking notice of the shops. He wondered what they were thinking. It’s what a good hunter did, tried getting into the minds of his prey. And he was a very good hunter.
The limo slowed. He slowed. He scanned the street to see if there was a hotel or inn on the block. There was none. The limo stopped. He stopped. Except he had stopped his Sentra in front of a donut shop. The limo had stopped in front of the police station. He was right to have followed the limo instead of coming into town from the other direction. Maybe this was going to be more of a challenge than he had anticipated. That was just fine with him.
26
Healy was sipping his coffee, sitting across from Jesse Stone. Jesse had his feet up on his desk. He’d finished his coffee and wasn’t ready to get up for a second cup quite yet. These were men comfortable with each other, men who could sit quietly together and think.
Healy said, “So the tissue and blood under the vic’s fingernails are a match for the kid’s.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s not good for him. He forces himself on her. She defends herself, digging her nails into him, draws blood.”
“That’s possible, but there was another set of footprints on the porch of the Salter place.”
“Size-twelve men’s Adidas basketball shoes,” Healy said. “It’s all there. Too big for the Salter kid. Didn’t belong to the vic. And the handyman, Farley, he doesn’t strike me as an Adidas-wearing kind of guy. Also found a partial shoe imprint in the mud below the broken window that’s a match for the porch print.”
“That works against the kid killing the girl,” Jesse said.
“Would seem so.”
“And the slugs were nine-millimeters, like we thought. Also seems that the father was telling the truth about the kid not owning firearms. I had Suit check it out.”
They sat in silence again.
“Well,” Healy said, “if the kid didn’t do it, what have we got?”
“What we’ve got is one definite homicide that now may be two. At the very least we’ve got an abduction in addition to the homicide.”
Healy screwed his face up as if the coffee had turned bitter in his mouth. “Where’s the ransom note?”
“Sometimes the family gets the note and they don’t get the cops. You know, ‘Don’t involve the police or else.’ Harlan Salter the Fourth strikes me as the kind of man who likes to handle things his way and on his own. He could barely tolerate his own lawyer.”
“You think he’d risk his kid’s life that way, by not involving the police? Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”
“Healy, there’s nothing about this case that feels right to me. Everything feels just a little off.”
“You going to put a man on the father?”
“Maybe, but it’s not like I’ve got the resources of the L.A.P.D. at my disposal,” Jesse said. “I’ve got a twelve-person department.”
“You never told me about your reunion with Vic Prado. Guy could play him some second base.”
Jesse thought about it for a moment before answering. He hadn’t really given Vic or the reunion much thought since he’d got back to Paradise. Murdered girls trumped Julio Blanco, Vic Prado, slow-hit grounders, and late throws. Well, there was one aspect of his brief time in New York City he had given some thought to: Dee Harrington. It was hard to escape thinking of her. Jesse considered several answers to Healy’s inquiry, but all he said was, “Better to leave the past where it belongs.”
Healy raised his eyebrows and left it at that. “I’m out of here. Anything comes up, I’ll let you know.”
“Same here.”
Jesse waited until he was sure Healy had left the station and then asked Molly Crane to come into his office.
“What’s up, Jesse?” she said.
“Who would you trust to tail someone without getting made within the first five minutes?”
“Suit. Me. You.”
Jesse shook his head. “Anyone else?”
“Buddy, maybe,” she said. “Gabriel.”
“The new guy?”
“New to us,” Molly said, “but he had a few years on the job in Boston.”
“Is Gabe on shift now?”
“Yeah.”
“Call him back here. I need to speak to him in person.”
“Care to enlighten me?”
“I want someone to keep an eye on Harlan Salter,” he said.
She frowned. “I can do it.”
“N
o, sorry. I need you for other things, and Salter’s seen Suit.”
“What’s going on, Jesse? You don’t think the father knows where the kid is, do you?”
“Not yet. I just have a feeling about this.”
“You’re going to leave us a man short based on a feeling?” she said.
“I get to do things like that because—”
“I know, Jesse. Because you’re the chief of police.”
“You’re catching on, Crane. Maybe I’ll keep you around.”
“Or promote me?”
He smiled at her. “Not likely, Crane.”
Molly smiled back. “Screw you, Jesse.”
Almost as soon as she closed the office door behind her, there was a knock on the pebbled glass. Molly stuck her head back into Jesse’s office.
He said, “You here to curse at your chief again?”
“I wish. There are two women here to see you, Jesse. And . . .”
“And what?”
“And they both make your ex-wife look like the ugly girl at the school dance. I don’t know what it is they all see in you.”
“Would you like to find out?”
She shook her head. “I don’t need a promotion that badly.”
“Maybe it’s my wit,” he said.
“No, Jesse, I can pretty much guarantee you it’s not that.”
“Send them in.”
“And when Gabe gets here?”
“Tell him to wait,” Jesse said.
When the door pulled back, Kayla Prado and Dee Harrington walked into Jesse Stone’s office.
27
Joe Breen preferred his old beat-up ’68 GTO to Mike Frazetta’s pearl-white Caddy CTS Coupe. The ride was velvety yet responsive. And sure, the Caddy had a ridiculous glut of horsepower, but the engine hummed, dosing out the muscle so smoothly that you hardly had a sense of speed. It was like sitting in first class on a jetliner. You knew you were going more than five hundred miles an hour, but it felt like you were on your living room sofa. Joe liked to feel the shifts, liked the strain of the engine, enjoyed the roar of it. Humming was for birds, not for engines. But he couldn’t argue with Mike. It would have been too risky to drive the GTO back into Paradise this soon after he’d killed the girl and snatched the boy. He usually wasn’t big on regret, but he hated imagining Moira’s reaction if she ever found out what a monster her lover could be. Moira was such a gentle and cultured girl. Just thinking about the sadness in the lass’s eyes when he told her he’d have to be away for a few days nearly broke what little heart Joe Breen had remaining in his chest.
Robert B. Parker's Blind Spot Page 8